CONTACT US
Erick Bengel | Features Editor
ebengel@dailyastorian.com
WEEKEND
BREAK
FOLLOW US
facebook.com/
DailyAstorian
HEARTHFIRE & BRIMSTONE
DINING ON
A BEANSTRING
Photos by Damian Mulinix
Before blanching your green beans, be sure to trim the ends. If your string beans are particularly long, feel free to cut them into smaller pieces.
Thanks to Calvin Keeney, there’s nothing stuck in your teeth
Making grandpas proud
By NATALIE ST. JOHN
For the Chinook Observer
W
hen I was small, we lived
in Fort Collins, Colorado.
On summer afternoons,
towering black clouds
would sweep in. The impending
downpour dictated a break, so my parents
often made popcorn and lemonade. For a
half hour or so, the air was charged with
that intoxicating summer-storm smell
of ozone, wet cement and grass — the
time-to-get-out-of-the-pool-smell.
We spent those cloudbursts together on
the couch, watching the lightning through
the plate-glass living room windows.
There was always a downpour, sometimes
golf-ball-sized hail. And then the popcorn
ran out and the sun broke through, fiercely
golden against the black sky. The earth-
worms came up for air and the world was
new again.
Thirty-five years later, I’m still chas-
ing that quintessential summer feeling
like one of those manic idiots that drives
his Ford Fiesta into the center of a tornado
so he can film it for YouTube.
Invoking the spirit of summer
We all have a precise nexus of tastes
and smells that instantly invokes the spirit
of summer — a seasonal food ritual that
says, We’ve finally arrived.
I asked my friends and family and got
a range of answers that showed how per-
sonal and specific each person’s sense of
summer is. Eating blackberries or Rainier
cherries. Making root beer floats. Grilling
and day-drinking. For my friend Jeff, it’s
drinking water from a garden hose. My
cousin Meghan throws watermelons in
her pool to bob around until dinnertime,
my cousin Jonell makes gazpacho with
garden vegetables and my Aunt Jeannie
eats “tomatoes. Every way imaginable.”
For my friend Conrad in California,
the essence of summer eating is “making
a sandwich and taking it to the park.” My
friend Wade in Oregon says it’s “a picnic
lunch with cold fried chicken and home-
made potato salad,” and for my friend
Peter in Virginia, it’s “going into the gar-
den to pick beans for supper.”
While green beans may be the star of the summer salad, good fresh tomatoes, light-
ly saut é ed onions and a lemon Dijon vinaigrette help make the tastes come alive.
a displaced desert rat so many of my ideas
about summer cooking are totally unreal-
istic here in the Land of Eternal Fog. As
I write this, my dog and I are snuggled
under a blanket and my Beloved is mak-
ing soup. Nothing about this summer’s
chilly weather inspires — or requires —
the kind of spontaneous, simple eat-’em-
over-the-sink tomato sandwiches, pitcher
drinks, supper salads, experimental popsi-
cles and whatever-is-ripe freeform tarts I
consumed in Augusts of yore.
There is one quintessentially sum-
mery dish that still appeals to me, even
in the depths of blustery late summer on
the Peninsula. I’ve never come up with
a better name than “Summer Salad.” It
depends entirely on fresh, ripe tomatoes
and tender, flavorful green beans. There’s
no cheating — at any other time of year
it tastes like something out of a grocery
store deli case, but in the summer it’s
magic.
And it wouldn’t be possible without
the long-forgotten efforts of Calvin Kee-
ney: King of the Stringless Bean.
Long-forgotten scourge
Of blankets and beans
What’s yours? I have about 30, but I’m
We all enjoy telling younger people
about hardships we’ve endured, if only
because there’s a singular pleasure to be
had in letting them know they couldn’t
possibly understand what it was like.
Here at the dawn of the 21st century,
most of us are so accustomed to getting
our food at the grocery store that we really
can’t wrap our heads around what it was
like to endure one of the great scourges
of our country’s agrarian past: the dread
bean-string.
In the wake of the Civil War, young Cal-
vin Keeney, of LeRoy, New York, joined
his father in running a produce stand. By
the early 1880s, Keeney had determined
to vanquish the string that bisected each
green bean shell. According to a 1921
edition of the American Florist (can you
believe this used to be a magazine!?), “he
conceived the idea that time and patience
could be saved and efficiency promoted if
the luscious string bean could be induced
to grow without the hempen fibers that
must be either removed from the pod
before the meal, or from the teeth during
it.” The same year, E.I. Farrington of the
Dearborn Independent wrote, “Everybody
knows string beans were very properly
named. Formerly, it was always necessary
to unwind a snarl of strings in dining on
this vegetable.”
Keeney was determined to become
the kind of man that Republican grand-
pas everywhere could cite when lectur-
ing their entitled grandchildren about
the value of hard work. And so, the Flo-
rist said, “he girded up his overalls and
went to work.”
Keeney spent an entire summer
crawling on his knees amongst the
beans he and his father grew for the pur-
poses of providing seeds to other farm-
ers, looking for pods that had no strings.
Whenever he found one, he flagged it.
At the end of that back-breaking
season, he had the beginnings of what
would eventually change the fortunes
of his family and town, and form the
backbone of today’s Monsanto empire:
a collection of seeds from those special
snowflake stringless pods.
He planted those, and for several
more seasons, continued reaping and
sowing seeds that were increasingly
more likely to yield the coveted string-
less beans. He introduced his first less-
stringy variety in 1884, and by 1911,
he had introduced 19 new varieties of
snap beans, according to the LeRoy
Pennysaver.
Bean-counters
Keeney’s invention launched his fam-
ily into a realm of previously unimag-
ined prosperity. They began acquiring
farmland, eventually dedicating more
than 6,000 acres to peas and beans. Kee-
ney started warehouses in LeRoy and
Cheboygan, Michigan, where women
worked long shifts as “bean sorters,”
and brought bags of bean seeds home
for children to sort for extra cash. Kee-
ney helped found canning, salt and plow
companies in Leroy, and became direc-
tor of a local bank. He bought cattle
farms in New York, cotton fields in Mis-
sissippi and a lumber enterprise in Ohio.
In 1923, he incorporated all of his
holdings and in 1927, merged with sev-
eral other seed companies to form a
company now known as ASGROW.
That ultimately became one of the
seed companies owned by the contro-
versial agriculture mega-corporation,
Monsanto.
See GREEN BEANS, Page 2C